5.  The applicants were born in 1936 and 1940 respectively and live in Chişinău.
6.  The facts of the case, as submitted by the parties, may be summarised as follows.
7.  On 27 January 1994 the room in which the applicants lived was declared uninhabitable. A report issued on 5 December 1996 by the Epidemiology and Hygiene Centre of the Ministry of Health confirmed that water leaked through the damaged roof into the room and caused damp. It requested the local authorities to respond appropriately to the situation.
8.  In 1999 the applicants initiated court proceedings. On 23 April 1999 the Centru District Court adopted a judgment in the applicants' favour (“the 1999 judgment”), ordering the Chişinău municipality to allocate them “accommodation in accordance with the number of family members”. No appeal was lodged and the judgment became final 15 days later.
9.  On 11 May 1999 the applicants submitted the enforcement warrant to the bailiff, who did not enforce it. The municipality responded to all the requests of the bailiff and of the applicants by stating that it could not enforce the judgment in view of the lack of available apartments. It was fined several times (the equivalent of 120 euros (EUR), it is unclear whether the fines were paid) but the judgment was not enforced.
10.  In 2002 the Decisions Enforcement Department (“the Department”) requested a court to return the enforcement warrant to the applicants without enforcement. On 28 September 2002 the Centru District Court accepted that request. On 28 September 2004 the Court of Appeal quashed that decision because the applicants had not been informed of it. The bailiff's request was remitted for a new examination and on 22 December 2004 it was rejected by the Centru District Court as unfounded. That decision was upheld by the Chişinău Court of Appeal on 16 March 2005.
11.  In 2003 the applicants requested a court to set a time-limit for the enforcement of the 1999 judgment. On 16 July 2003 the Centru District Court set a two-month time-limit but no enforcement followed.
12.  Also in 2003 the applicants requested a court to change the means of enforcing the 1999 judgment by ordering the Chişinău municipality to pay them the price of a two-room apartment or to register their title to such an apartment in one of the newly built houses belonging to the State and to compensate them for the damage caused by the non-enforcement. On 28 November 2003 the Centru District Court rejected that request, finding that such requests could only be examined as part of separate proceedings. On 17 March 2004 the Chişinău Court of Appeal rejected an appeal by the applicants.
13.  The applicants initiated separate proceedings asking for compensation for damage caused by the non-enforcement and for registration in the land register of their title to a two-room apartment. In two judgments of 16 December 2004 the Centru District Court rejected both requests as unfounded. These judgments were upheld by the Chişinău Court of Appeal on 26 April 2005. Both courts exempted the applicants from paying the court fees on account of their difficult financial situation. The applicants appealed and asked for an exemption from the payment of court fees for their appeal, in view of their difficult financial situation. They also claimed that they had paid the major part of the price of the apartment (9,550 Soviet roubles) at the beginning of the 1990s.
14.  By a letter of 11 May 2005 the Supreme Court of Justice informed the applicants that their appeal could not be examined because it was handwritten and the court fees had not been paid. The court informed the applicants that no exemption from payment because of their difficult financial situation was possible. The applicants did not pay and the case was dismissed for failure to pay the court fees.
15.  On 11 October 2005 the Chişinău municipality allocated two-room apartments to I.F., R.M., S.I. and V.N., who had the right to accommodation on the basis of court orders of 3 April 2000, 30 June 2003 and 29 September 2004 respectively (two of the above-mentioned received the court orders on the same day). The applicants submitted a request to be allocated accommodation on a priority basis since the judgment in their favour had been adopted in 1999, but it was not examined. The applicants challenged the failure to examine their request in court.
16.  On 24 November 2005 the Court of Appeal quashed the municipality's decision and ordered a re-examination of the applicants' request and the allocation of a two-room apartment to them.
17.  On 22 February 2006 the Supreme Court of Justice quashed that judgment and ordered a rehearing because the municipality had not been present when the Court of Appeal adopted its judgment. On 12 May 2006 the Chişinău Court of Appeal rejected the applicants' claims. On 12 July 2006 the Supreme Court of Justice upheld that judgment, finding that the other persons to whom the applicants referred had received apartments clearly exceeding the size of the apartment to which the applicants were entitled. Accordingly, those apartments could not have been allocated to the applicants. That judgment was final.
18.  In parallel proceedings the Department decided, on 1 September 2005, to freeze the procedure for distributing apartments in apartment blocks built by the municipality and certain private businesses, pending enforcement of several court judgments, including the final judgment in favour of the applicants. On 18 October 2005 the Centru District Court partly quashed that decision. On 15 December 2005 the Chişinău Court of Appeal quashed the Department's decision of 1 September 2005. The first applicant asked for the reopening of the proceedings, but on 30 March 2006 the Chişinău Court of Appeal rejected that request as unfounded. That decision was upheld by the Supreme Court of Justice on 28 June 2006.
19.  According to a document issued on 11 January 2007 by the National Bureau of Statistics, more than a thousand new apartments were made available in the city of Chişinău each year during the period 1999-2006. The document did not specify the proportion of State-owned apartments in the above number.
20.  The judgment of 23 April 1999 has not been enforced to date.
21.  In two separate actions, the applicants complained that they had been unlawfully dismissed from their jobs.
22.  The first applicant's claim was initially rejected by a judgment of the Centru District Court of 12 November 1998, but was allowed on appeal by the Court of Appeal on 17 June 1999. The Prosecutor-General filed a request for the annulment of the latter judgment. On 10 September 1999 the Supreme Court of Justice accepted that request and quashed the Court of Appeal's judgment, while upholding the judgment of 12 November 1998.
23.  The second applicant's claim, filed in January 2001, was granted on 11 June 2002. In a letter of 9 March 2004 she complained about the excessive length of those proceedings.